Graduation Rate Envy

Economics, politics and sociology come together is a surprising place - the NCAA website.

These data are compiled because schools compete in athletics for money, and some feel the others are cheating by admitting non student student athletes. The data are likely accurate, since competing schools have an interest in keeping competitors from cooking the books.

The NCAA publishes the graduation rates of all member schools, stratified on gender and race. Any school whose name you might know is there, and the rates are dramatically different.

http://www.ncaa.org/grad_rates/2004/d1/index.html

The above site compares graduation rates for scholarship athletes to the studentry in general. There are no data on athletes for the Ivies, because the Ivies have no scholarship athletes to which they are willing to admit. The Ivies allege to giving no "merit" scholarships of any kind, athletics or otherwise, only need based scholarships.

[In a canonical tale, a football coach was quoted as saying that all his football scholarships were based on need: if the team didn't need the kid, they wouldn't give him a scholarship.]

Those of us who follow Big 10 and other national sports will also find the graduation rates of the teams to be of interest. When comparing graduation rates of scholarship athletes v. non athletes, remember that 100% of the athletes have scholarships, and some living expenses paid, while the others get whatever is average for the student body. Ivy schools run in the 90 - 98% range, Columbia being lowest at 90%. You can compile the range for your favorite conference.

Graduation rates for basketball are opaque, because there are so few on the team. Football gives more visible data. For a lot of these schools, graduation rates run 33% for the whole student body, not hard for the football team to beat. BrooklynDodger may post some data later.

The site below gives a new measurement, the APR. The APR awards 1 point for maintaining eligibility, and 1 point for staying in the institution at all, averaged over the whole team and normalized to 1000. Failure to maintain an APR of 925 for a team will cause a loss of scholarships in the near future. The NCAA says an APR of 925 corresponds to an approximate 50% 6-year graduation rate. [By my calculations, if 1/10 people on the team flunk out and leave, that yields an APR of 920; I assume that is based on a cohort starting the year. I didn't study this carefully enough to figure the rules and the statistical allowances for small teams.]

APR's are there for the Ivies as well as the rest.

For those in the mid-east region, Ohio State's APR for football is 870 [that is 55 points underwater, measured against a water line of 50% graduation], while U of M carried a 952 and MSU a 906. Notre Dame scored a 934.

http://www2.ncaa.org/academics_and_athletes/education_and_research/academic_reform/school_apr_data.html

BrooklynDodger imagines the impact of this system will be for coaches to identify failure prone athletes who are still above water at the end of the year, and kick them off the team before they enter next year's cohort.